To the Editor:

New York State just finished paving a portion of State Route 37, the Ogdensburg-Waddington Road. They couldn’t complete about 3-4 miles of it at the Waddington end - NY didn’t have enough money. This road should have been resurfaced two years ago. Last year the state wasted a lot of money doing countless patches that not only didn’t improve the surface but didn’t even last the winter.

About a year ago the dingbat in the executive mansion in Albany gave four million dollars to a millionaire private citizen to build a new ball park. Her husband owns and profits from the concessions stand operations in that same ballpark. No conflict of interest in this financial exchange?

Where does she get the authority to give NY citizens’ tax money to an individual millionaire? The funds should have been spent rebuilding the road. The people of New York need a lot of things more than they need a new ball park.

I called Assemblyman Scott Gray’s office to ask about the amount spent on the new paving on Route 37. Three days later a man from the Department of Transportation called to tell me I would have to file a FOIL (Freedom Of Information Law) request to “maybe” get the information on the cost of the paving. So far there’s been no reply. I called Senator Walczyk’s office to ask the same question. Two days later they called me back to tell me the cost was 1.86 million dollars. This should be public information, so why was it a secret? The news editor of North Country This Week, Jimmy Lawton, has an excellent article on this that ran in the July 15-21 edition of the paper.

Hochul has the same mentality as Joe Biden - screw everyone. She is supposed to work for us, not the other way around. This year she put into law a lot of gun laws that were unconstitutional. Now somebody has to spend more money and time to take them to court in the hopes of overturning them. She is making it impossible to live in NY. I saw on television last night that over 100,000 people have left New York State. 27% of New York State residents say they also plan to leave sometime in the next five years.

New York State’s debt level rose to $61.9 billion in State Fiscal Year (SFY) 2021-22 (Office of the New York State Comptroller). So why give 4 million to an already wealthy man in Buffalo for a ballpark. It’s ridiculous and so is she. She should be prosecuted for giving away 4 million dollars of taxpayers' money. Better yet, let’s recall her from office.

William Bartlett
Ogdensburg